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Home / Other I-Appliances / Intel dot.station Sucessful Hacks Sucessful Hacks

Sucessful Hacks (modified 0 times) jsmmd Profile I would like to propose that anyone who has sucessfully modified a dot(bob, or tiger), list for the record what they did, what worked, and what didn't in this thread. I'll back fill my posting later this week or next. To kick things off. I took a dot.bob (w/phone), had a physical bios hack done, (thanks to Kludgemeister, others can contact BadFlash.) Running Win. XP with 256 megs of RAM (will document man. and model later) vs. standard 64 megs. w/ standard modem. Phone doesn't seem to work, but modem does. 12-15-2003 22:24:14

RE:Sucessful Hacks (modified 0 times) radarman Profile I managed to get my dot.bob2 (sans telephone) modded fairly quickly using the instructions in the BIOS Flasher thread. Essentially, I stripped down the dot.bob2 to the box containing the mainboard, and placed the monitor/PS chassis aside. I'm using a standard ATX power suppy and monitor for the moment. I also added a power button on pins 3 & 4 of the control panel connector (using parts from an old ATX case) so I don't need to remove anything from the front panel. For the record, the keyboard that comes with the unit is a PITA POS - it was replaced with a real USB keyboard and mouse. Other than the bizarre wiring harness with the front USB port, card reader and two speakers, it looks like a normal PC at the moment. I moved the hard disk to another PC running RedHat 9, and placed the flasher utility, compare utility and the ABAZ firmware from the flashpack.tar.gz package in /hdb8/blueriver/bin directory. (actually, I tried several other places, but the OS kept deleting the files) I also implemented the language, xterm and provisioned hacks from the website. Once done, I replaced the original drive in the dot.bob2. On a side note, the dot.station linux distro does NOT have a tar or gunzip utility - so unpack the files on another system, and copy the relevant ones over. Once I got an xterm window, I su'ed to root using the '1234' password. While the system was powered up, and I had a root shell, I ran the flash utility and verified that only the first bank was readable. I then shorted pins 24 and 25 of the Intel FW hub (marked N82802AB on my board) with a small flathead screwdriver for about 5-6 seconds, and reran the flash utility - this time verifying that I was able to retrieve all of the pages. Once I verified that the protection was disabled, I flashed the ABAZ firmware, and then reread it to verify it was written correctly. In hindsight, I would have installed the P05 firmware, but I didn't realize that WinXP would have so much trouble with it. At this point, I removed the original hard disk, replaced it with an empty 120GB hard disk, installed a laptop CD-ROM (using the dremel tool method), and installed WinXP. XP doesn't work well with the ABAZ firmware, so I downloaded the windows P05 BIOS installer. Fortunately, the installed proved stable enough to run the BIOS updater - unfortunately, the XP install was already toasted, so formatted the disk, and reinstalled. On the second go, under the '05 BIOS, XP ran fine. That's it. The rest of my mods involve cutting a hole for the CD-ROM in the front cover, and modifying the LED's so that the blue and green lamps are switched. 12-16-2003 10:36:34

RE:Sucessful Hacks (modified 0 times) Kludgemeister Profile Wow, it's been a while... I check back on the board every few weeks or so to see if there's anything new and exciting. Props to Scaner and crew for the BIOS flasher! That is true hacking. I'm just a garage mechanic in comparison! My hat is off to them. Manuel (the name my wife and I gave to her Dot.Station) is working really well as her home office PC. Mostly used for online banking, but also a good CD player. Very routine, nothing earth-shattering! I basically cheated. Once jsmmd pointed out the Dot.Box (OEM) motherboard, I bought one to play with and eventually bought a second on eBay way cheap. I also used the hot-air SMT rework station at work to remove the BIOS chips from a couple of Dot.Station motherboards and sent to Badflash for reprogramming. My experience in replacing my iopener BIOS (easily flashable, compared to the infernal Intel BIOS of the Dot.Station!) gave me confidence to solder new sockets for the 82802AB BIOS chips. If I contributed anything original to the effort, it was realizing that the Intel engineers had planned for a slim notebook CD-ROM in the design of the Dot.Station. It was then easy to work out the holes necessary in the front chassis cover and outer bezel to accomodate the optical drive. I bought a surplus drive on eBay and used an adapter from iDot and placed it as slave on the primary IDE channel. I gave up on my grandiose ideas of CNC machining the outer bezel and "stealthing" the drive, and just Dremeled an opening in the bezel. I gave up on the "Spanish" modem early on, because I realized that the sound on the original motherboard was routed through it. On the OEM motherboard, I just removed the back-panel headphone/speaker socket and made a little adapter to tie the speaker output into the Dot.Station wiring harness. I bought a Creative Labs 5631 speakerpohone PCI modem, and removed the modem bracket in the chassis and reworked a regular modem expansion-slot bracket and riveted into the chassis to hold it. The speakers work well, also the handset, but the built-in microphone does not work (I think, due to a wiring error on my part--I think it is a condenser mike and needs a bias voltage which I did not provide.) I installed Windows 98SE using 98lite to nuke IE etc. and give a stable installation. No memory expansion, CPU upgrade, or anything special. It was fun to build up, and gave Linda a neat, compact PC/boombox for her home office. I am impressed by the guys who are hotrodding their Dots. That's not my scene--I'm back down in the garage, troubleshooting the stepper motor controlling on my home-converted CNC milling machine... Kludgemeister 12-18-2003 00:25:59

RE:Sucessful Hacks (modified 0 times) radarman Profile Kludgemeister, The audio ISN'T routed through the modem at all on the original dot.station mainboards. The modem audio is routed to the line-in as though it were a normal PCI modem. I'm not sure how the microphone is handled for the speaker phone, as it is routed onto the mainboard. I traced all of the wiring on the harness going to the modem, and they are all buttons and switches. Perhaps the modem DMA's the audio from the soundblaster hardware, but the mike works without the modem. Also, if you examine the OEM boards, all of the dot.station connectors are there - just unpopulated. You may be able to completely convert an OEM board to a dot.station board by simply verifying if all the hardware is present, and then add some headers. I would be willing to bet, given the functionality they provide, that the headers are "live" -radarman 12-18-2003 08:53:49

RE:Sucessful Hacks (modified 0 times) PeteC Profile All info / resources were provided by all on this forum A quick overview of what I have done with my Intel Dot.station to date: - Bios Chip Replacement - Thanks "Badflash" - Newest BIOS Rev - Thanks "Intel" - Slim CDROM mod and cutout - Thanks "Kludgemeister" dremel and patience - Slim CDROM adaptor - Thanks "Kludgemeister" http://www.idotpc.com/TheStore/Peripheral/_Spec.asp?Product.id=658&Cate.id=17&Product.status=green $7.00 plus 7.96 for shipping - 40 to 50 pin IDE cable - Thanks "Kludgemeister" - MPEG Capture / TV Tuner / FM Tuner - Geeks.com - Capture card cutout / mounting - dremel - difficult - direct audio out (from capture card board) to audio input on MB - soldered on capture card to standard CDROM audio cable - 256 Meg RDRAM - Ebay - 850Mhz 100Mhz FSB CPU - Geeks.com - OS - MS Windows XP Pro, myHTPC, etc goal - "Icebox" like Kitchen TV Pending - IR - keyboard/mouse/remote 12-18-2003 13:27:30

RE:Sucessful Hacks (modified 1 times) Kludgemeister Profile radarman, you've got me there. So I'm a lazy SOB and took the easy way out. I never traced the wiring harness that came from J5E1 on the Dot modem (in fact, removed those wires from the harness to save on bulk after I installed the Creative modem.) If you ever trace the rest of the wires, let me know and I'll fill in the rest of the schematic I started. I guess 23 years later I still have the "recent college graduate" mentality of there's something cheap--I can use it instead of hacking stuff as its own hobby... Kludgemeister 12-20-2003 01:24:17

RE:Sucessful Hacks (modified 0 times) sven Profile well i have the "currently in college" mentality of there's something cheap -- i can probably use it if I don't have to waste tooooo much time on it :) With that in mind i haven't bothered with cdrom mods or even testing to make sure my speakers still work... I also took the modem out since i figured i'd never bother configuring linux to dial an ISP... NOTE* take loads of pictures as you take the dot station apart... they are invaluable when it comes time to put it back together. Also, upon flashing the bios (mine is a dot.bob /w phone, same as the one on jsmmd's site as far as i can tell) and putting the dot back together, i've managed to break the power on/off and monitor brightness control functionality. I'm pretty sure i wired everything back together correctly. Has anybody else had this problem? Maybe the new bios doesn't have support for the strange board the dotstation has up front taking input from the buttons... Here's what I did to hack it... 1. took the dot apart, and removed HD (which I hooked up to another computer I have). 2. followed jsmmd's knoppix and xterm tutorial word for word to get a shell up and running 3. moved the contents of the flashpack.tar.gz (available here http://www.distribucionpakito.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=25) to the /dev/hda8/blueriver/bin/ directory on the dot station HD and mostly followed the instructions for flashing the bios. I skipped the part where they say to short the two pins on the bios chip partly b/c my initial bios.fw was not blank data after 15%, and mostly because i couldn't be bothered to figure out which way was right-side-up for the chip :) 4. rebooted to make sure it worked and put the HD back into my other computer to install debian on it. The only thing i had to make sure was that the dot station HD needed to be the master on the primary IDE cable (in my comp). This was important since debian installs the LILO bootloader which needs to know what device the linux partitions is on (i.e. /dev/hda or /dev/hdb etc...) and since it is the primary HD in the dot station (aka /dev/hda) it also needed to be the primary HD in my computer so the links would be created correctly. Once again this was me being lazy (to save myself the trouble of reconfiguring LILO after installation.) 5. after making sure the HD booted in the dot, i carefully reassembled the whole thing. Everything seems to be working great (sans the power on/off switch and the monitor brightness/contrast controls). -sven 12-20-2003 21:18:12

RE:Sucessful Hacks (modified 0 times) SiliconIce Profile This new flash program is great, got 4 of my dot.bobs hacked I tried skipping the screwdriver on the last 3 after reading sven's post and I had no problems. Flashed, dumped, and compared, no difference. So maybe no need to use the screwdriver? After the first one, I even managed to get all the screws back in for the rest, though I did have a couple more in various states of assembly to use as a guide ;) Running Win2k all of them so far. No problems with install, straightforward. I knew these would be nice machines eventually :) 12-26-2003 14:43:37

RE:Sucessful Hacks (modified 0 times) latas Profile Hi guys. Take in care that it's only necessary to short those two pinouts of the firmware flash chip if your Intel Dot Station, is an original one, with the startup screen where you are able to see a Welcome message in several languages with a blue color background and a green ball in the middle of the screen. For the rest of Intel Dot Station where the firmware was reflashed before and you're able to use it as a standard PC with a standard BIOS, you don't need to do that operation. That operation is required because original Intel Dot Station machines are protected to avoid to read that firmware memory regions. Regards. 01-16-2004 02:13:57

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